Having given up its "lies, all lies" line of defence, the Palestine Authority, faced with the daily barrage of embarrassing leaks, aired in this newspaper, have fallen back on that most slippery of excuses, "out of context" – let's call it OOC.

It's everywhere. Do a Google news search, 26/1/11, and you'll find Julie Fleeting in the Scotsman defending Andy Gray and his allegation that women can't master the intricacies of the offside rule. "Taking remarks out of context," Fleeting instructs us, "isn't necessarily the right thing to do." Guys slap wet towels at each other's naked buttocks in the locker room and say raunchy things but – context, context, context – they don't do it in the press box on mic. Unless they're prats like Gray and Keys.

Wigan's chairman, Dave Whelan, tells us he won't be disciplining his midfielder Mohamed Diamé for calling Wigan a "crappy place" and slagging off its fine womanhood (less beautiful than those in Madrid, the player alleged) because "the quotes were taken out of context". What's the context? All that wonga Wigan shelled out for Diamé?

In the US, Maurice Jones-Drew tweeted that quarterback Jay Cutler had displayed something less than guts. Sure enough, he later insisted that he had been taken out of context and was "taking at shot at Florida fans". Right.

A spokesman for John Lewis states "how disappointed we are that our decisions, which were for purely commercial reasons back in 2008, have been used out of context by the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign." That "decision" has been (mis)interpreted as a gesture of sympathy with the Israeli boycott movement. You can find the context on Google.

I could go on – but there will be another crop tomorrow and you can riffle through them as easily as me.

I don't approve of it but I nonetheless feel a pang of pride when the OOC defence is invoked. Where did it originate? Literary criticism – my line of work. It was in the 1920s, at Cambridge University, that the English faculty shifted from talking about "works of literature" and began talking about "literary texts" instead. The term has since bred like rabbits: subtext, intertext, paratext, and – controlling all of them – context. It culminates in Jacques Derrida's magnificent announcement: Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. There is nothing outside the text. You and I don't live in a real world, we're signifiers in a text, itself within a global context.

Crazy, you may well think. But that lit-crit wheeze, contextualise everything, has seeped, insidiously, into public discourse. Nothing, OOC decrees, is absolute, everything is situational (another term beloved by literary critics). Nick Clegg proclaims to the electorate he will abolish student fees. But that was in the context of his fantasising prime ministerial power for his party. In the context of his being the Tories' poodle the promise is no promise. Why? OOC.

Amanda Knox confesses, but later invokes OOC. She was exhausted and coerced when she did it. Lord Triesman excused his taped remarks about sneaky foreigners and their backhanders by saying the Daily Mail had "taken his remarks out of context". In a restaurant, warmed by wine, conversing with a young lady, one says things one wouldn't say at a minuted FA committee meeting.

Triesman was right of course. All of us live our lives on that principle, whether we admit it or not. The OOC ploy is incredibly useful but it makes everything too slippery to use. Give it back to the literary critics, I say. It belongs in their toy shop, not in the real world.

Oh, while I think of it. Don't take anything said above out of context (particularly that remark about the deputy prime minister). This is, after all, Comment is free.